To encourage more collaboration among its employees, the marketing and media company left behind a traditional office space where walls separated the creative team

WeWork Soho South

New York

Chief Strategy Officer Jon Hammond says Galvanized Media — the company that produces Eat This, Not That!, Best Life and other active lifestyle titles in addition to providing custom content and branding resources — wanted a more collaborative environment. They decided on a spacious top-floor office at WeWork Soho South.

“We were in a traditional office before,” says Hammond. “I had an office, while most of the content team sat in cubicles. It’s amazing what bringing down both the office walls and the cubicle walls, can do for collaboration.”

The WeWork space is stunning, illuminated by a massive skylight. Most of the 28-person staff works together in the main room, but there are also two smaller rooms used mostly for meeting with clients or private conversations with staffers. And when it’s time to expand — the staff has more than doubled in the last year — they can easily add more space.

Hammond says conversation about things like the best protein bars to recommend to readers get everyone’s creative juices flowing in the WeWork space.

“It’s amazing. Breaking down those walls had a huge impact on quality of the content we are putting out.”

Jon Hammond

“It’s energizing for me and the other managers to roll up our sleeves and dive into a 15-minute conversation,” says Hammond. “It might seem like a little thing, but it’s not. It brings the entire team together, it gives everyone the opportunity to have a voice.”

In addition to its branding and marketing work for a number of A-list companies, Galvanized is the power behind websites like Eat This, Not That! (aimed at people interested in diet and nutrition) and Best Life (an active lifestyle brand for millennial men and women). It also publishes books like the best-selling Zero Belly franchise and the forthcoming Super Metabolism Diet.

Hammond says that in a traditional office, the various departments would have little contact with each other. But in this new open layout, editors of Eat This, Not That! and Best Life now sit on the cozy sofas, bouncing ideas off each other.

“This is how it’s supposed to work, right?” says Hammond. “This is an environment that best captures the excitement and energy of our audience. It’s what you want to happen when your teams are thinking about new and innovative ways to create content.”